Time to Stop with the Legacy Backup Solutions

A couple of months ago I attended the UK Veeam ON Forum in London. Once my brain had registered that I was not on my way to the Aviva Stadium with several hundred of my fellow countrymen, but in fact at an IT event, things started to make more sense.

This was to be a day packed full of information Veeam wanted to share with its partner community, and I am glad to say it didn’t hold back.

My key takeaway from the day is the number of people who lack the proper ability to meet recovery objectives defined within their business, and as organisations move to a hybrid cloud that inability is only increasing.

When surveyed by ESG, 4 out of 5 respondents disclosed that their current infrastructure cannot keep up with the IT needs of their company and users suffer.

Follow up questions in this survey also highlighted that 3 out of 4 organisations were exceeding their allowance for data lost due to an outage. This is mind-blowingly huge!

These two areas are referred to as the Availability Gap and Protection Gap and it is clear to see that with the drive for businesses to do more with less and leverage the public cloud, we are seeing that data bears these burdens and is ultimately losing.

I have long proposed to companies “How long can you let your employees sit idle? How damaging for your brand would it be if you could not transact orders or your website was down? And how much money would your business lose in that period of time?”

These are just some of the questions that must be asked and answered correctly throughout a piece of data’s life to properly assess and implement a strategy to accurately and properly defend and deliver it with speed back to the business.

There seems to be a drive for organisations to implement new technology and upgrade existing hardware, but the protection and availability are a secondary or tertiary response.

Data is a company’s most valuable asset.

Caesar’s Entertainment Corporation’s single most valuable item on their books isn’t the faux Roman architecture hotel in the middle of Las Vegas strip, it’s the company’s big data loyalty program that has been running since 1998 and holds over 45 million member records. With a figure of $1B attached.

This brings together two interesting points, how many companies out there are not taking the time and care with data that concerns me as a customer and also, how insufficient the understanding of the value of the data a company holds about a person or organisation.

As a personal consumer, I would be slightly put out and may consider moving my custom if I contacted my butcher for instance to ask for “the same cut I had last week”, yet he had no record of the transaction and my meal is not turning out as nice as I wanted it.

But in business, what if I were to contact a supplier and say, “you know that last batch of X was great, can I get another 1000 or 10,000 ASAP and put it on my account”.

Well, without the proper information at hand I can neither see what that order was to fulfil it again, check if the customer has credit to place such an order and where to ship it once produced.

Care and consideration must be taken with this data and how we safeguard it should be as intrinsic as the application that creates and accesses the information.

So why Veeam you may ask?

Simply put, because they understand the 24 by 7, always on business environment we now live in.

This is a 21st Century company not constrained by 1980s backup architectural design and a leader of innovation within their field.

So let’s stop talking backup and look at what we really demand: Availability.

Over the coming weeks, I am going to be looking into why Veeam and its ever-increasing portfolio of products?

What it can deliver, how it can quickly and effortlessly meet a company’s availability and protection needs, whether on-site or in the cloud.

About Arrow

Arrow is a global supply channel partner to over 100,000 original equipment manufacturers, contract manufacturers, and commercial customers, in sectors ranging from aerospace to automotive, telecommunications to transportation.

Arrow’s contribution feeds into everything these companies produce, from cars to coffee makers to cable boxes. Consequently, Arrow touches everyday life for individuals across the world, at least twenty times a day on average.

Arrow is a Fortune 150 company and recognised as one of Fortune’s Most Admired Companies. Arrow operates in over 460 locations in 56 countries, with 18,500 employees serving 100,000 customers worldwide. Here in the UK and Ireland, we have over 600 employees working out of seven locations.